Author of 35 books with major publishers (Time-Life,
McGraw-Hill, Career Press, Harcourt Brace, Grosset & Dunlap, Ten Speed Press, Price/Stern/Sloan) on higher education,
computers, travel, U.S. history, cooking, publishing, and consumerism. Four titles have appeared on various bestseller lists.

In the business world I was, most recently, Head of New Business Development for the Financial Times division of Pearson PLC,
the world's largest educational publisher (Prentice Hall, Addison Wesley Longmans, Scott Foresman, Penguin, Putnam, etc.).

Pearson purchased the company my wife and I founded and ran for seven years, International Business Education, Inc.,
which did marketing in North America for two large British universities, the University of Leicester and Heriot-Watt University
(which ultimately had the largest MBA program of any kind in the United States and Canada).

In earlier times, I was Director of the Center for the
Gifted Child in San Francisco, Research Director for the Bell & Howell Company's educational division in Chicago, Head
of Advertising and Corporate Communications for the Midas Muffler Company (Midas-International) in Chicago, and Associate
Professor (with tenure) in the University of Iowa School of Journalism, and head of the Senior Honors Program.

My
consulting clients have included the F.B.I. (degrees and credentials), the Grateful Dead (marketing and financial planning),
General Motors (safety programs), Xerox Corporation (product development), and Encyclopaedia Britannica (product development).
I have also consulted with more than 2,000 individuals and a dozen universities, on matters related to earning or marketing
degrees.

I have
also had involvements with three unaccredited institutions. More than 25 years ago, I consulted in the start-up of Columbia
Pacific University, founded by two men with impeccable credentials: a Harvard M.D. psychiatrist, and the former president
of three regionally-accredited universities. Columbia Pacific was a state-approved university, with more than 30 full-time
employees, whose graduates qualified to take the state psychology and other licensing exams. My involvement ended more than
25 years ago. In 1986, I was very briefly involved in the planning for Fairfax University, but resigned less than two months
after it was registered in Louisiana, before any students had enrolled. And in 1990-91, while living in Hilo, Hawaii, I was
the full-time president of Greenwich University, which incorporated the non-profit International Institute for Advanced Studies
(founded in 1972 in Missouri).

John Bear

I live in a San Francisco suburb with my wife, Marina,
an author and community college teacher (ethics, bioethics, world religion), and our Wheaten terrier, Luiseagh ("Lucy"). Hobbies
include folk dancing (the form called circle dance), magic (I have been initiated into the Society of American Magicians),
and an imminent return to tennis, and the prospect of building a model train layout ("N") and starting bagpipe lessons.

Daughter/co-author Mariah is executive editor at the San Francisco office of a large British publishing company. Our twins,
Susannah (a registered nurse) and Tanya, live in Oregon with their husbands and our five grandchildren.